Embodiments of the inventive subject matter generally relate to the field of computer storage systems and, more particularly, to retention management for data stored on a tape.
Laws and regulations may require retaining data for a certain period of time whereby data shall not be deleted or changed during the retention period.
Many storage systems exist that offer such functionality. Once the data is stored in the storage system and on the medium a retention period is assigned, the storage system may ensure that the data cannot be deleted or changed during the retention period. When the retention period has expired the data may be allowed to be deleted and storage capacity may be freed up to be reused.
Typically, archiving applications, such as enterprise content management systems (ECM) or document management systems (DMS), manage the retention period of their data. When the data is stored, the ECM system may instruct the storage system about the retention period, the storage system may apply it and may prevent deletion or modifications. During the lifecycle of the data retention, an ECM application may prolong the retention which may then be implemented by functions according to prior art storage systems. When the retention period has expired, the ECM system may instruct the storage system to delete the data.
WORM (write once, read many) tape may be compliant with the linear tape-open (LTO) standard—such as LTO3, LTO4 and LTO5, as well as the IBM System Storage TS1100™ tape drive and the Oracle T10000 tape drive with Volsafe™ technology. Such systems may provide retention protection in a way that the data, which is stored on the WORM tape, may never be deleted. This means that even if the retention period of a document (data) may have expired the data cannot be deleted. Upon expiration of all data on a WORM tape, the entire tape may be shredded. This can be a disadvantage because resources are wasted. Another disadvantage is that a WORM tape may not be re-written again, even if all data or a subset of data has expired.
Tape systems according to the prior art typically comprise one type of network interface that may be used for reading and writing data. The network interface can typically be implemented by Fibre Channel or Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). Another type of network interface for servicing a tape system or performing systems management activities such as firmware updates may be based on an Ethernet connection.